Space (23 page)

At seventy kilometers she fell into the first clouds.

The stars winked out, and thick yellow mist closed around her. Soon even the Sun was perceptibly dimming, becoming washed out, as if seen through high winter clouds on Earth. Still the bulk of Venus's air ocean lay beneath her. But she was already in the main cloud deck, twenty kilometers thick, the opaque blanket that had, until the age of space probes, hidden Venus's surface from human eyes.

The buffeting became still more severe. But her capsule punched its way through this thin, angry air, and soon the battering of the high superstorms ceased.

Her main parachute blossomed open; she was briefly pushed back hard in her seat, and her descent slowed further. There was a rattle as small unmanned probes burst from the skin of her craft and arced away, seeking their own destiny.

The visibility was better than she had expected: perhaps she could see as far as one, even two kilometers. And she could make out layers in the cloud, sheets of stratumlike mist through which she fell, one by one.

Now came a patter against the hull: gentle, almost like hail, just audible under the moaning wind noise. She glimpsed particles slapping against the softscreen window: long crystals, like splinters of quartz. Were they crystals of solid sulphuric acid? Was that possible?

The hail soon disappeared. And, still fifty kilometers high, she dropped out of the cloud layer into clear air.

She looked up at the rigging, giant orange parachutes. The capsule was swaying, very slowly, suspended from the big parachute system. The clouds above were thick and solid, dense, with complex cumulus structures bulging below like misty chandeliers, almost like the clouds of Earth. The Sun was invisible, and the light was deeply tinged with yellow, fading to orange at the blurred horizon, as if she were falling into night. But there was still no sign of land below, only a dense, glowing haze.

With a clatter of explosive bolts her parachutes cut away, rippling like jellyfish, lost. She dropped further, descending into thickening haze. The lower air here was so dense it was more like falling into an ocean: Venus was not a place for parachutes.

The light was dimming, becoming increasingly more red.

Telltales lit up as her capsule's protective systems came online. The temperature outside was rising ferociously, already far higher than the boiling point of water -- though she was still twice as high as Earth's highest cirrus clouds. The lander's walls were a honeycomb, strong enough to withstand external pressures that could approach a hundred atmospheres. And the lander contained sinks, stores of chemicals like hydrates of lithium nitrate, which, evaporating, could absorb much of theferocious incoming heat energy. But the real heat dump was a refrigeration laser; every few minutes it fired horizontally, creating temperatures far higher even than those of Venus's air.

I'm floating in a sea of acid, she thought, in a mobile refrigerator. It all seemed absurd, a system of clunky gadgetry. It was hard to believe the Gaijin would do it this way.

And yet it was all somehow wonderful.

Now there was a fresh pattering against the hull of the ship. More hail? No, rain -- immense drops slamming against her virtual walls, streaking and quickly evaporating. This was true acid rain, she supposed, sulphuric acid droplets formed kilometers above. The rain grew ferocious, a sudden storm rattling against her walls, and the drops streaked and ran together, blurring her vision. For a brief moment she felt frightened, adrift in this stormy sky.

But, as quickly as it had begun, the rain tailed off. It was so hot now the rain was evaporating. A little deeper the intense heat would destroy the acid molecules themselves, leaving a mist of sulphur oxides and water.

Abruptly the haze cleared below her. As if she were peering down toward the bed of some orange sea, she made out structure below: looming forms, shadows, what looked like a river valley.

Land.

Suspended from a balloon, she drifted over a continent.

"This is Aphrodite," Nemoto murmured from the distant Moon. "The size of Africa. Shaped like a scorpion -- look at the map, Carole; see the claws in the west, the stinging tail to the east? But this is a scorpion fourteen thousand kilometers long, and stretching nearly halfway around the planet's equator..."

Carole -- in her refrigerated balloon-lifted lander, still very high -- was drifting from the west, past the claws of the scorpion. She saw a monstrous plateau: nearly three thousand kilometers across, she learned, its surface some three kilometers above the surrounding plains, to which it descended sharply. But the surface of the plateau was far from smooth. She saw ridges, troughs, and domes, a bewildering variety of features, all crowded within a landscape that was blocky, jumbled, cut by intersecting ridges and gouges.

"The land looks as if it's been cracked open," she said. "And then reassembled. Like a parquet floor."

"...Yes," Nemoto whispered at last. "This is the oldest landscape on Venus. It shows a history of great heat, of cataclysm. We will see much geological violence here."

Everywhere she looked the world was murky red, both sky and land, still, windless. The sky above was like an overcast Earth sky, the light a somber red, like a deep sunset -- brighter than she had expected, but more Marslike, she thought, than Earthly. The Sun itself was invisible save for an ill-defined glare low on the horizon. The "day" here would last more than a hundred Earth days, a stately combination of Venus's orbit around the Sun and its slow rotation -- the "day" here was longer than Venus's year, in fact.

Beyond the great plateau, she crossed a highland region that was riven by immense valleys -- spectacular, stunning, and yet forever masked by the kilometers of cloud above, hidden away on this blasted planet where no eyes could see it. The easternmost part of Aphrodite was a broad, elongated dome, obviously volcanic, with rifts, domes, lava flows, and great shield volcanoes. But the most spectacular feature was a huge volcanic formation called Maat Mons: the largest volcano on Venus, three hundred kilometers wide and eight kilometers high. It was a twin to Mauna Loa, Earth's largest volcano, stripped of concealing ocean.

This was a world of volcanism. The vast plains were covered by flood basalts -- frozen lakes of lava, like the maria of the Moon -- and punctured by thousands of small volcanoes, shield-shaped, built up by repeated outpourings of lava. But there were some shield structures -- like the Hawaiian volcanoes, like Maat Mons -- that towered five or eight kilometers above the plains, covered in repeated lava flows.

As she drifted farther east, away from Aphrodite and over a smooth basalt lowland, Carole learned to pick out features that had no counterparts on Earth. There were steep-sided, flat-topped domes formed by sticky lava welling up through flaws in the crust. There were volcanoes with their flanks gouged away by huge landslides that left ridges like protruding insect legs. There were domes surrounded by spiderweb patterns of fractures and ridges. There were volcanoes with flows that looked like petals, pushing out across the plains.

And, most spectacular, there were coronae: utterly unearthly, rings of ridges and fractures. Some of these were thousands of kilometers across, giant features each big enough to straddle much of the continental United States. Perhaps they were formed by blobs of upwelling magma that pushed up the crust and then spread out, allowing the center to implode, like a failed cake. To Carole the rings of swollen, distorted, and broken crust looked like the outbreak of some immense chthonic mold from Venus's deep interior.

There were even rivers here.

Her balloon ship drifted over valleys kilometers wide and thousands of kilometers in length, unlikely Amazons complete with flood plains, deltas, meanders, and bars, here on a world where no liquid water could have flowed for billions of years -- if ever. One of these, called Baltis Vallis, was longer than the Nile, and so it was the longest river valley in the Solar System. Perhaps the rivers had been cut by an exotic form of lava -- for example, formed by a salty carbon-rich rock called carbonatite -- that might have flowed in Venus's still-hotter past.

Suspended from a balloon, Carole would drift over this naked world for a week while her eyes and the lander's sensors probed at the strange landscapes below. And then, perhaps, she would land.

She was, despite herself, enchanted. Venus had no water, no life; and yet it was a garden, she saw: a garden of volcanism and sculptured rock. My mother would have understood all this, Carole thought with an echo of her old, lingering guilt. But my mother isn't here.
I'm
here.

But Nemoto, coldly, told her to look for patterns. "You are not a tourist. Look beyond the spectacle, Carole. What do you see?"

What Carole saw was wrinkles and craters.

Wrinkles:
the ground was covered with ridges and cracks, some of them running hundreds of kilometers, as if the whole planet were an apricot left too long in the Sun.

And
craters:
they were everywhere, hundreds of them, spread evenly over the whole of the planet's surface. There were few very large craters -- and few very small ones too; hardly any less than five or ten kilometers across.

"...Violence, you see," Nemoto said. "Global violence. Those wrinkles in the lowlands, like the tesserae cracks of the highlands, are proof that the whole of the lithosphere, the outer crust of this planet, was stretched or compressed --
all at the same time.
What could do such a thing?

"And as for the craters, there is little wind erosion here, Carole; the air at the bottom of this turgid ocean of gas is very still, and so the craters have remained as fresh as when they were formed. Few are small, for that thick air screens out the smaller impactors, destroying them before they reach the ground. But, conversely, few of the craters are
large.
Certainly none of them compare with the giant basins of the Moon. But those immense lunar basins date back to the earliest days of the Solar System, when the sky was still full of giant rogue planetesimals. And so we can tell, you see--"

" -- that these craters are all young," Carole said.

" -- that no crater is much older than eight hundred million years," Nemoto said, not yet hearing her. "In fact, no feature on the surface of this planet appears older than that.
Eight hundred million years:
it might seem an immense age to you, but the planets are
five times
older still. Carole, eight hundred million years ago, something happened to Venus -- something that distorted the entire surface, wiping it clean of older features, destroying four billion years of geologic heritage. We can never know what was lost, what traces of continents and seas were brutally melted..."

Eight hundred million years, Carole thought.
The same age as the moonlet artifacts.
That was the significance Nemoto saw. Her skin prickled.

What had been done to Venus, eight hundred million years ago?

She drifted into the planet's long night. But there was no relief from the searing warmth, so effectively did the great blanket of air redistribute the heat; at midnight the air was only a few degrees cooler than at noon.

Nemoto's automated probes, she learned, had found life on Venus, here on this baked, still planet.

Or rather, traces of life.

Like the heat-loving microbes of Earth's deep ocean vents, these had been creatures that had once swum in a hot, salty ocean of water. Carole learned that human scientists had long expected to find such organisms here: organisms that must now be extinct everywhere, their potential lost forever, destroyed by the planet's catastrophic heating. Nothing left but microscopic fossils in the oldest rocks...

The sky wound down through degrees of deepening crimson. As her eyes adapted to the dark, she saw that there was still light here -- but no starlight could penetrate the immense column of air above.
The ground itself
was shining: she saw wrinkles and ridges and volcanic cones looming eerily from the dark.

On Venus, even at night, the rock was so hot it glowed.

But this faint illumination did not seem hellish. It was as if she were drifting over a fairyland, a land halfway to unreality; and the inversion of her perspective -- darkness above, light below -- seemed very strange.

When she reached the dawn terminator, there was a slow and subtle change, of ground glow to sky shine, and the world became normal once more.

Nemoto told her to prepare for landing. Nemoto's agitated excitement was obvious. She directed Carole to head for the mountains. Through her automated probes, Nemoto had found something, a worthy target for their one-and-only attempt at landing.

Ishtar Terra was a continent the size of Australia, rising high above the global plains. Carole drifted in from the west, over a plateau called Lakshmi Planum: twice the size of Tibet, a place of huge volcanic outflows. The perimeter of the Planum was composed of rough mountain ranges -- long, curved ridges with deep troughs between, terrain that reminded her of the Appalachians seen from the air. And its southern perimeter was a huge clifflike feature: three kilometers high, sloping at more than twenty degrees, its great flanks littered by landslides.

To the east the ground began to rise up toward the immense, towering mountain range called Maxwell Montes. She drifted south over one great summit. It was eleven kilometers tall, one and a half times as tall as Everest, and with a giant impact crater punched into its flank. She descended toward the southwestern corner of the massif.

The landing was gentle, flawless.

The first human on Venus. Mom, you should see me now.

Carole stepped forward, picking her way between loose plates of rock. There was no wind noise. But when her metal-booted feet crunched on loose rock, the noise was very sharp and piercing; sound, it seemed, would carry a long way in this dense, springy air.